The Arizona Republic predicts Phoenix will reach 100° F Monday, the first time this year (and a week later than average). Here’s some of their take on summer survival in the Valley of the Sun:
When the triple digits hit, hiding from the sun becomes a survival instinct. You run errands at night. You stay in the office for lunch, trolling the Web for cheap fares to San Diego. The chilly movie theater is Mecca, and there is no greater gift from the universe than a shady parking spot.
“I would probably drive around 10 to 12 times” before settling for a spot in the sun, Phoenix resident Jillian Cooper said. Cooper works at Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, where everyone fights for the uncovered, close-to-the-mall parking spots that line Camelback Road in the winter, then hightails it to the garage when the heat hits.
“You could get killed in that garage. It’s insane,” said Cooper, 21, who keeps a towel in her car for use as a steering wheel buffer on days when there is no shade to be had.
At Tokyo Express restaurants, you’ll need an ice chest if you want the employees to happily sell you take-out sushi, general manager Kako Iwaoka said. Buying ice cream at the grocery store means speeding home, unless you’ve a hankering for vanilla soup. It seems suddenly completely rational to eat shaved ice for lunch.
At Bahama Buck’s in Mesa, where 92 flavors of shaved ice seem like summer solved, manager Ryan Cooper said customers wait outside the store each day for the 11 a.m. opening.
This time of year, Arizonans are suckers for anything frozen: there are frozen water bottles, freezer shelves full of Otter Pops, even frozen bed sheets. (Put dry sheets in the freezer, let them chill, and then fall asleep in an icy cocoon. After all, if they heat bath towels in the Midwest, why not chill bed sheets in the Southwest?)
It never reached 100° in Albuquerque last summer, though it did eight times in 2003. Phoenix had a low temperature one day that summer of 96°.
I use to drive around, as a teenager, in my 1972 Maverick, with no air conditioning in that heat. As if it wasn’t anything, though I’m sure I complained. Now I have the air on full blast when I go out.
NewMexiKen carried the mail two summers in Tucson, sometimes on days when it reached the 110s in the shade. And there isn’t much shade carrying the mail.
Try construction in that heat.
But it is a dry heat.
“But it is a dry heat.”
So is Hell.
I remember working construction on the nine-story bio-sciences building at the University of Arizona in June of 1985. They had most of the glass in the windows and no way to move the air around inside.
I was living a mile and a half from there and so I walked to work, which was great at when I left home 5:20 in the morning. We started at 6:00. By 6:15 each morning my shirt was soaked with sweat.
It was always hot walking home. One day it seemed much worse than usual. When I got home just before 3:00 p.m. I turned on The Weather Channel and it was listing the current temp out at the airport as 114. Who knows what it was around all the concrete and asphalt?
I have operated shovels a few too many times under those conditions.
We had mid-day temps in the mid-fifties here in Portland this week.
Exactly why I don’t live in Southern Arizona any more. I never had AC in my houses, and almost all of the cars I ever owned were without it because they were so old. We used what Dad used to refer to as 4-40 air conditioning. (Open all four windows and drive 40 mph.) Kenny finished concrete curbs in Tucson with his face bent over the fresh asphalt (which raises the temp significantly) for nearly 20 years. Talk about brutal! (It’s also why he looks so much older than he really is.) Astoria summers average 65-75 most of the time, and now that I know better, I wouldn’t dream of trading it for a desert summer.
Clearly the heat has baked my brain but I love it here and have no real desire to live anywhere else. I was tarring a roof working for my father the day it hit 117 for the very first time. I bitch all the time but I will never shovel snow.